


Surprise

by Querulousgawks



Category: Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Male-Female Friendship, Romance, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 14:58:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2274078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Querulousgawks/pseuds/Querulousgawks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wallace was so occupied with outwitting Veronica, he didn't notice what was happening right in front of him. A ficlet cross-posted from Tumblr, set during the movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surprise

Wallace hunched a little but stood his ground in Keith’s living room, trying not to show triumph _or_ fear. Looking at Mac’s uneasy expression would just make him question the brilliance of the Piznarski Reunion Operation, and he wasn’t ready for that. Got to keep the high of outsmarting Veronica for at least another couple of minutes. And he definitely wasn’t meeting the Mars laser eyes just yet, so he dropped his glance a little, looking for a safe space to rest it. Mac’s shoulder.

She was going to turn the heads of those washed-up 09ers tonight, with her swooped-up hair and the wide collar of her soft dress. They pulled the eyes to her face, not that he needed to be redirected, under normal circumstances. That was probably why he had never noticed the long line of her neck, before – her face wasn’t usually off limits. Not when she scowled at him over a video game controller, refining her tragic white-girl version of trash talk, or when she dropped her jaw unnecessarily wide to receive a well-snapped popcorn kernel. (All in the follow-through.)

They’d had a lot of couch bonding nights, after the force of nature whose gaze he was avoiding had blown out of town. Mac had been there for his slow disillusionment with mechanical testing, entering miniscule spec adjustments into modeling programs for planes he’d never touch. He’d listened to her horror stories when a string of exciting startups dissolved into long hours of getting her ass ogled and her ideas ignored. But he hadn’t offered up his mom’s card until the day she’d slumped into his couch and swore she’d sell out to the first soulless corporation with an actual HR department.

“No one’s got less soul than Kane Software, right? And Mom’s a VP, now, - somebody slaps your ass in there, she’ll take his hand off with the paper cutter.” Mac had slowly reached out for the card, taken it by the very edges, and dropped it in her purse. The next morning, he’d opened his email to a list of science-focused online teaching certificate programs, ranked by cost and prestige, with the subject line ‘Reduce your misery by 50% TODAY!” He’d almost reported it as spam before noticing her address; and had thought later that it was like her, to build in a face-saver for if he chickened out.

Turned out it stung a little less to give up on your dreams alongside someone else – for better or worse, he still wasn’t sure. He'd started tutoring through the certificate program while he was still a CAD monkey by day, and found himself growing hooked on the light-bulb expression that would occasionally click on in the tired eyes of kids in the head start class. And once the job went through, his mom was warm with Mac in a way that she’d never quite pulled off with Veronica, even after she and Mr. Mars had reconciled. It was the tech thing, maybe, or maybe she had just felt like Mac was safe. Not likely to break his heart or land him in jail, when most of the girls he brought home were one or the other, and sometimes both.

He’d kept quiet about the wider applications of Mac’s computer skills, in hopes that his mom would stay reassured about the jail thing. The heart thing – it hadn’t even occurred to him, not about Mac.

Not that it was occurring to him now, exactly. It was just that her shoulder didn’t seem like such a safe place to look, anymore. Or her neck. Definitely not the dip in her collarbone. His pulse picked up for no good reason as he raised his eyes to her face, and it was almost like she said it to him:

“Surprise?”


End file.
